I don't want to stream the Olympics

Remember when everything didn’t have to be done over IP?

This, I will admit, is a rant that I have been boring my friends with at the pub for a long time (sorry, Alice). The Olympics has brought it to a head, but this complaint is one I have had ever since the Streaming Revolution took hold.

I like it when television comes into my house via aerial and satellite.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I moved home recently into one of the rural backwaters¹ that still only has VDSL service, and my download speed is capped (by the technological limitations, rather than my service provider) at a measly 75 Mbps. Such first world problems! However, that’s 75 Mbps on a good day, and because I’m still cramming my ones and zeroes down a copper cable it can be wildly variable — to say nothing of the also wildly variable ping times and occasional packet loss as my precious bytes seep into the soil surrounding the cable trunk.²

All of this is to say that my internet service is, occasionally, absolute dogshit.

Now. If I were to want to watch telly nowadays, the obvious thing to do would be to purchase a smart TV,³ install the apps for the channels and Content Providers I wanted to watch, and stream whatever programmes I like. I can watch what I want, and if I part with Just A Tiny Amount of Money a Month, I can do so without having to put up with insufferable advertising. And, sure, whatever. For programmes — because I refuse to start calling it content the way everyone seems to call everything these days — that weren’t originally broadcast live, this is Basically Fine. I mean, sure, the Content Provider can suddenly decide that I am no longer allowed to watch stuff because they have failed to renegotiate an extension to their streaming rights, but hey. Who am I to question the Almighty Rightsholders?

But sports?!

I’m no sports buff, to clarify. Occasionally I’ll watch the cricket when it’s on, and I’ll dip in and out of the Olympics when interesting stuff looks like it’s happening (though I must say I’m far more interested in watching the Paralympics in a few weeks). But even for a casual sport consumer such as myself, I really don’t understand why we have to do that over streaming now. It’s happening live! Can we not use the infrastructure that already exists for pumping television into every household in the country to deliver that sport to people in a live sort of fashion?

Even if your internet connection isn’t awful, is it not a well-established thing that streaming just sort of… isn’t very live at all? Like, yes, I know there are hundreds of thousands of people having a great time watching stuff live on Twitch and YouTube and Blorbo and whatever the kids are using these days. But still, don’t we all sort of realise these things have delays, and buffering, and the spinny wheel of doom? Don’t you want to be able to experience the moment your country wins gold, you know, actually live?

Part of this problem is that I’m unfortunate enough to live in the UK. Discovery have bought up the pan-European broadcasting rights to the Olympics — which is a whole separate blog post in itself about how much I hate that — and shoved most of it on Discovery+. To be fair, they are broadcasting some of it on their premium Eurosport channels — and, again, there’s a separate blog post about how it should be illegal to put the Olympics behind a paywall — but most of the action is on either Discovery+ or BBC iPlayer (because the BBC are only allowed to run one live stream on broadcast television under their sub-licensing deal with Discovery).

I know technology has come far since the first live internet broadcasts happened (remember Justin.tv?) and things can be a lot closer to real-time than they used to be. But it all still goes over IP. Rather than one copy of the broadcast being beamed out from a big stick in Crystal Palace or a tin can in space, each individual device in my block of flats has to go and fetch its own copy of the content over an already-congested IP network. And if your individual connection to that network is not as good as you’d like it to be, your viewing quality goes down the toilet. To say nothing of the bandwidth issues with internet video, especially when there’s confetti or glitter involved.

Look. I’m not a Luddite,⁴ and I love a bit of modern technology (when it works). Giving more people access to television without having to have new equipment installed is a good thing. But how many houses are there in the UK without the ability to receive conventional broadcast television? I’m sure the number is not zero, but when you can buy a portable Freeview antenna and plug it into a laptop, the number can’t be very high. We should make things available over the internet, sure, but not at the expense of continuing to use the systems that were designed specifically for live broadcasting. I have an uninterrupted ~50 Mbps stream of any television channel I could want to watch thanks to a magic bucket on my roof, that (because of the one-way nature of broadcasting) doesn’t get congested when my other half downloads something. It works virtually all of the time. It works when my internet connection is out. It works when the servers carrying live internet broadcasts get CrowdStruck.⁵

Broadcasting technology is good, and not everything needs to be done over IP.